Open building

Open building is an architectural approach that plans for the possibility that a building will need to change or be adapted over its lifetime in response to social or technological change, balancing the competing interests of the wider community and of an individual occupant over the built environment. The approach originated in the Netherlands in the 1960s, when the architect John Habraken set out its founding ideas in his book Supports, An Alternative to Mass Housing, published in Dutch in 1961 and in English in 1972, arguing that housing must account for two separate domains of action, that of the community and that of the individual inhabitant. Open building separates a structure into a base building, which provides the structural framework and shared systems, and a fit-out layer, which individual occupants can customize without altering the base structure, allowing a building to adapt over time as technology and social patterns change. A Dutch research foundation called SAR was established in Eindhoven in 1965 to develop the approach, the OBOM research group followed at TU Delft in the 1980s, and an international commission known as CIB W104 formed in 1996, drawing members from more than a dozen countries, to document and promote open building worldwide.